Procurement Management Services for Aluminium Food Packaging Manufacturing
Operational Complexity
Warehousing and inventory management in the Aluminium Food Packaging Manufacturing environment is shaped by two distinct operational demands. On the inbound side, raw materials arrive from international suppliers against Advance Shipment Notices (ASN), requiring a receiving process that can reconcile notified shipment quantities against purchase orders and actual receipts across a geographically distributed supplier network. On the inventory side, raw material enters the facility in weight-based units and is consumed through a continuous production process that outputs finished goods in discrete countable units, requiring inventory to be tracked accurately across a production environment where the unit of measure changes at each stage.
Existing Systemic Lacunae
The organization's inbound receiving and inventory management processes were not supported by an integrated system prior to this engagement. Inbound shipment notices were handled manually with no mechanism to track receipt status or reconcile quantities across purchase orders, and inventory records across production stages could not be consistently maintained as units of measure changed through the processing line.
These gaps affected both operational accuracy and inventory control. Without system-driven receiving workflows and unit of measure conversion, stock levels at any given stage of production were unreliable, and discrepancies between ordered, shipped, and received quantities required manual intervention to identify and resolve.
ASN-Based Inbound Receiving
The organization sourced aluminium rolls from international suppliers across Europe and Asia. In cross-border procurement, suppliers issued Advance Shipment Notices ahead of physical delivery, communicating shipment quantities and item specifications. For the organization, receiving goods against these notices was the foundation of its inbound receiving process given the frequency and geographic spread of international shipments.
With no system support for ASN-based receiving, notices received via fax and email were manually transcribed and entered against existing purchase orders. There was no systematic way to manage multiple ASNs against a single purchase order, track inbound shipment status, or reconcile notified quantities against what was eventually received. Discrepancies between ordered, shipped, and received quantities were identified only after the fact, requiring manual intervention to resolve.
The procurement workflows within Apache OFBiz were adapted to support ASN-based receiving workflows. The system was configured to support a flexible mapping between ASNs and purchase orders, accommodating scenarios where multiple ASNs were raised against a single purchase order as well as scenarios where a single ASN covered multiple purchase orders. Receiving transactions were recorded against ASNs rather than directly against purchase orders, establishing a three-way reconciliation between ordered quantity, notified shipment quantity, and actual received quantity. This brought systematic traceability to inbound receiving throughout the organization's international supplier network.
Unit of Measure Conversion Across Production
The organization sourced aluminium rolls from international suppliers, with procurement prices determined at international commodity exchange rates. Rolls were received and recorded in weight, making weight the inherited unit of measure for raw material inventory entering the production facility. As rolls were fed into the processing line, inventory continued to be tracked in weight, with records updated at different levels as the roll diameter decreased through consumption.
With no unit of measure conversion support in the legacy system, inventory could not be consistently recorded as material transitioned from weight-based roll consumption to count-based sheet output. When sheets were cut from the rolls and divided into smaller pieces, there was no systematic basis for translating the weight consumed into the number of pieces produced.
The manufacturing module within Apache OFBiz was expanded to support unit of measure conversion across the production workflow. Conversion logic was introduced at each stage of the processing line, enabling weight-based roll consumption to be tracked through diameter-level inventory reductions, and then expressed as a count of discrete sheet pieces as material moved into the cutting stage. Production orders were managed with the unit of measure appropriate to each stage. The solution also incorporated palletization support, enabling finished goods to be grouped into pallet units before outbound dispatch, with pallet-level quantities tracked through to shipment.
Summary
This case study demonstrated how manufacturing, procurement, and inbound supply chain operations in the packaging industry were brought under a single system built to match the operational reality of the business. The depth of customization spanned multiple functional domains: manufacturing constructs were extended to support virtual product-level BOM management and unit of measure conversion; procurement constructs were extended to formalize ASN-based receiving, manage landed costs across international shipments, and enforce vendor and approval governance; and party and facility management constructs were extended to represent the full inbound logistics network from port of origin to receiving facility.
The result was an operational foundation that brought consistency to production cost tracking, accuracy to inventory valuation, and structure to procurement governance over an international supplier network. This case highlights building custom manufacturing and supply chain solutions using open-source technologies such as Apache OFBiz and Moqui, supporting organizations in aligning system architecture with the specific demands of their operations.
